Myspace in the throws of death - Predictable?

Myspace announced this week of layoffs of over 420 (30%) of their staff.

Not like this wasn't predictable.

First off, if you checked the foxcareers.com website, you'd always find openings for myspace.com. Like, seriously, always. A company is never hiring for this many people all the time, especially when there isn't reasonable proof that the company is engaged in gang buster profits. It is simply an unsustainable business.

Second, Myspace is really so 2005. After News Corporation acquired it, it was immediately deluged with ads, lame video sections, and a half-assed attempt at creating a music store with DRM-laced everything. Snocap stores to multiple video players on one page, myspace.com pages looked more like a clutterance of crap (a la 1995 webpages) than a cohesive creation of credible experiences.

A recent L.A. Times article tries to explain why Myspace is on the wane. Clearly written by someone not really connected in the scene, or is simply too old to understand what these phenomena are. It cites the corporate line that the company was "too bloated" to move nimbly to compete with the likes of Facebook. This is true, but not the whole reason. Yes, a large super-multi-globo-corp like News Corp can never compete with the barefoot engineers at Facebook because there is something inherently cool about creating new, cool stuff for people to use. Giant corporations have a set-it-and-forget-it mentality which is incompatible with running a business at Internet speed. One example of this is that their networks are populated with Windows XP systems running IE6, and reading emails on Novell Groupwise. HUH? Wow.

Another is a little more subtle. Myspace is/was based in Los Angeles. In 2005, during the rise of myspace.com, L.A. was all about everything indie: indie artists, indie music, anti-corporate establishment mentalities. Myspace music was based a lot on an "all-electronic" model of what the CD distribution-turned-iTunes distributor CD Baby was. More simply, Myspace Music was to promote the little guy, even the playing field, make money through a kind of crowd-sourcing. Even a radio station called Indie 103.1 was created to capture and harness the power of the "new independent artist". It was the rise of the e-promotion, the grass roots effort, the new way to organize large armies of people, to promote your brand, your band, your identity. Everyone bought it.

One problem: the indie artist doesn't make enough money to support all this overhead. It never will. Myspace.com friend counts were more fraud than fact. Early artists like Tila Tequila were more titillation than talent. So when the indie market for talent collapsed in Los Angeles in 2007, so also collapses Myspace's hopes and dreams. Myspace became a billboard rather than an interactive, connective experience. Bands were indistinguishable from eachother. Friend counts were automated and people used myspace as an Inbox rather than a connection tool. Look, people don't like friggin advertisements. They don't like their experience to be wallpapered by endless ads for the next big 20th Century Fox movie. And, they (the users of Myspace early on) barely had enough cash to buy the indie artist's CD. They weren't going to patronize the thing being advertised at the level that was projected. It was sort of the "FU for buying/corporatizing Myspace" message. After the indie collapse and the subsequent economic downturn, WHAM! Ad revenues vanished, and what was left, the viewers weren't buying anyways. What does that mean? A whole lot of unpopularity for Myspace.

Another reason for the Myspace losses is more a demo issue. Many articles written illustrate that the average user now on Myspace is a mid-thirties male. Mid-thirties. Young people spend money indiscriminately - not mid-thirties. As well, those young people don't want to be where old people go, where many cops go, where many pedophiles go, and they don't like having their profile on the same system as their mom, teacher or coach. It isn't cool. And young people have been exposed so much to advertisements, that it doesn't affect them as well as on an older person who, say, really wants to see Megan Fox do anything because they don't see hot young women that often.

Facebook has surpassed Myspace for ease of use, excellent trend-chasing (like with Twitter apps), and the noticable LACK of advertisements. Like Twitter, people just want to connect, not buy music (there's Itunes or Amazon for that), not watch videos (Hulu, Youtube or any number of the bazillion other sites for that) or have to wade through a page jammed full of ads and wait for pages that don't load quickly because the code loads the ads first.

Myspace is simply too ignorant to realize this reality and it's death is hopefully forthcoming.

As long as Facebook doesn't make any more bonehead UI revisions (like adding giant banner ads everywhere) it will retain it's tactical advantage over Myspace, and will hold up after the predecessor to Facebook breaks.

Facebook is still not for the young - it's a great way to replace classmates.com, for one!

I've had many a wonderful experience with Myspace. I met many amazing people, from all over the country - all over the world. But it's time has come to end, and let the new innovators of the 21st century take their bow.